Getting Desperate

byColin Groves

Dr. Colin Groves is
a paleoanthropologist and Professor of Biological
Anthropology at the Australian National University.

This article is a response to an article by Answers in
Genesis, which was itself a response to the article Up from the Apes published in Time on August 23, 1999.

Answers in
Genesis must be getting desperate. They have been sniping away at
evolution for over twenty years now, and the scientific community remains
unmoved. Serious periodicals like Time and Newsweek likewise
continue to give science preference over pseudoscience. The Time
article, Up From The Apes shows why: scientific understanding progresses as
new discoveries are made, whereas pseudoscience stands still, forever beating
the same drum.

They begin by misunderstanding the difference between science and its
popular reporting:

In reality, there is actually little new in this article. What is
new is trivial, and does not establish human evolution, any more than
similar claims (now mostly discredited) did so in the past.

Of course! Articles in Time are not written to "establish
human evolution". They are written to disseminate news about progress in
science. To find out what is the evidence for human evolution, you have to
read whole books with sustained arguments: I don't mean popular books by
Richard Leakey or Don Johanson, but full-on textbooks such as are used in
second/third year university courses. As for finding out what is new in
palaeoanthropology, you must read the original articles in Nature,
Science, PNAS or elsewhere.

AiG continue:

The article papers over the profound disagreements amongst
evolutionists themselves about the significance of the various claims. For
example, Ardipithecus ramidus is proudly portrayed as our ancestor closest
to the apes. When the evidence is examined, it is found most wanting,
especially when it is remembered that it was claimed as THE missing link at
the time it was announced to the eager media. The bits and pieces were found
scattered over about a mile and put together to get 'the missing
link'.

Yes and no, though mostly no. Most of the material (teeth, many of
them associated, a skull fragment, a hemimandible and a humerus) was found at
a single locality, and of the rest the associated arm bones and the associated
skull fragments were found at two others (WoldeGabriel et al., 1994,
Fig.1).

Next, we have an example of the lack of understanding of biological
taxonomy and of the rules of nomenclature:

Homo habilis is now widely recognized as a mixture of different
types, technically called an "invalid taxon".

The term "invalid" carries the implication that the taxon concerned is
a junior synonym of some other taxon. Every species has, or should have, a
type specimen, so only if the type
specimen of Homo habilis (which is
Olduvai Hominid 7, or OH7 for short) is found to belong to some other species
does the name Homo habilis lapse into synonymy. In the present case,
it has been proposed (Groves, 1989) and widely accepted (Wood, 1992 and
elsewhere; Kramer et al., 1995; Strait et al., 1997), though not universally
(Miller, 1991; Tobias, 1991), that the fossils that had been ascribed to the
species Homo habilis should actually be partitioned among (at least?)
two separate species. The one to which OH7 belongs is automatically to be
called Homo habilis; the other, typified by the famous Lake Turkana
skull, ER 1470, is called Homo rudolfensis.

AiG go on to reveal how unfamiliar with the naming and morphology of
fossil hominin specimens they are:

Skulls 9,11,12,13,14 and 15 are all just variations of the true
human kind.

One never simply refers to "skulls 9,11, ..." etc. Fossils (which are not
necessarily skulls, of course) are numbered by their site of discovery. It is
clear from the context that these are Olduvai specimens, not from Koobi Fora,
Omo Shungura, Hadar, Sangiran, Skhul, or some other site, so they should have
been referred to as "OH9, 11, ..." etc. I will take these specimens in
turn:

OH9 is a calvaria, that is, the major portion of a
braincase. It is low and angular, and the brow ridges are enormous, the
largest known on any fossil hominin. When discovered, it was commonly regarded
as an African specimen of Homo erectus, but it falls way outside the
range of variation of that species. So far, it is one of a kind. It most
certainly is not a variation of "the true human kind", if by that is meant
Homo sapiens; all one can say is that it does belong to the genus
Homo. Incidentally, I can't see why it is in the list ("Skulls 9 ..."
etc.) above, as at no time has it ever been considered a member of Homo
habilis.

OH11 is just a palate and maxillary arch. It has not
been fully described in the literature. Tobias (1991) classes it as Homo
erectus without discussion.

OH12 is a partial calvaria with associated maxillary
fragment. It has a very small cranial capacity (727cc) but thick cranial
walls. Again, Tobias (1991) refers it to Homo erectus.

OH13 is a partial skull, with braincase, palate and
both upper and lower teeth. It is a specimen of Homo habilis, with a
cranial capacity of 673cc. (Tobias, 1991).

OH14 is a very fragmentary cranial vault of a
juvenile Homo habilis.

OH15 is a small collection of Homo habilis
teeth.

The list therefore contains some substantial specimens (OH9, 12 and
13), which are all way, way outside the morphological range of variation of
modern humans, as well as some pretty insubstantial ones (OH11, 14 and 15)
which I have not seen, and I bet no-one in AiG has seen -- at any rate, if AiG
have any evidence to dispute Tobias's assessments of them, then they are not
letting on.

Then they trot out the same old assertions they always do about
australopithecine locomotion:

Various respected evolutionists have provided evidence that
Australopithecus spp. (pictures 2-8) did not walk upright, certainly not
in anything like the human manner (e.g. Oxnard on anatomy,1 Spoor on inner
ear balance organ structure2), and are not transitional between apes and
people. This is totally left aside by the article. There is no reason to
connect the australopithecines to humans, except in the belief system of
evolutionists.

Reference 1 is to Oxnard (1975, 1984), and ref. 2 is to Spoor et al.
[sic; not just "Spoor"] (1994). Poor Charles Oxnard finds himself
quoted, much to his dismay, in every single creationist piece on human
evolution, without exception. At least the present AiG writers have not
stooped to quoting Zuckerman, who has hitherto been the other anatomist that
creationists have deigned to acknowledge as an expert on human evolution; but
they have not come to terms with Oxnard's own evolving views, and continue to
cite him as if he still thought the same as he did 15 years ago or more. In a
small teaching resource booklet, which to my knowledge is his latest written
opinion on the matter (Oxnard, 1991:30-31), he first gives the basic data on
australopithecine postcranial anatomy, then discusses possible functional
interpretations, and finally comes to what it means for human evolution. He
puts forward four scenarios: it could be (1) mosaic evolution (not all parts
evolved at the same rate), or (2) parallel evolution (bipedality evolved more
than once from closely related ancestors), or (3) convergent evolution
(bipedality evolved quite independently, from quadrupedal ancestors), or (4)
the australopithecines could be unrelated to human evolution at all. His
preferred option is a combination of mosaicism and parallelism. Creationists
should notice that Oxnard rejects option 4 out of hand, and they
should stop quoting him as if he supports it.

The reference to Spoor et al. (1994) is ingenuous. What AiG missed in
that paper is -- well, they obviously missed the entire message of it, but the
implication which Spoor et al. draw for australopithecine locomotion is
encapsulated in a statement on p.648,

These observations support studies of the postcranial fossil
record which have concluded that H. erectus was an obligatory biped,
whereas A. africanus showed a locomotor repertoire comprising facultative
bipedalism as well as arboreal
climbing.

The background to this is that there are two schools of thought about
australopithecine locomotion. One school holds that as well as being bipedal
they retained considerable climbing ability (McHenry, 1986, 1992, 1994; Stern
& Susman, 1991; Duncan et al., 1994; Berger & Tobias, 1996; Berge,
1998; Macchiarelli et al., 1999); the other sees the powerful arms and
funnel-shaped thorax as primitive retentions, and argue that
australopithecines were obligate terrestrial bipeds (White & Suwa, 1987;
Lovejoy, 1988; Latimer, 1991; Tuttle et al., 1991; Gebo, 1996; Ohman et al.,
1997). Some French authorities see the australopithecine sample as falling
into two groups (facultative arboreal and obligate terrestrial), with
intermediates between them (Senut & Tardieu, 1985; Senut, 1991; Bacon
& Baylac, 1995). I am nowadays more convinced than I formerly was by the
arguments of the "obligate terrestrial school"; for example Latimer (1991)
lists quite a number of features of the lower limb that resemble the human
condition and no other, such as that the hallux (big toe) of A.
afarensis is not abductable as would be required for grasping.

This list of authors on australopithecine locomotion is very far from
exhaustive. None of them expresses any opinion remotely resembling those
attributed to Oxnard and to Spoor et al. by AiG: not even Oxnard or Spoor et
al. themselves. There is no reason not to connect the australopithecines to
humans, except in the belief system of creationists.

The final sentence in the AiG article is pure fantasy:

When complete fossils are found, they are easy to assign
clearly as either 'ape' or human(1),
there are only 'ape-men' where
imagination colored by belief in evolution is applied to fragmented bits
and pieces.

What do they mean by "complete"? There are of course many fragments
for which one would wish to propose an identification only after the most
painstaking study, and even then perhaps only tentatively; these would include
OH11, 14 and 15, which the AiG article so glibly claims as "the true human
kind". There are also very many which, though in different states of
completeness, none the less all possess perfectly diagnostic traits of some
described species or other. "Ape-men" disappear only where imagination colored
by belief in special creation is applied, whether to well-preserved skulls or
postcranial bones, or to what AiG are pleased to dub "fragmented bits and
pieces".

1.View the table on the skull
comparison page, which demonstrates that creationists actually find it not
'easy', but horribly difficult to classify fossils as ape or human. If we compare
five of the most important creationist writers on humans origins (Gish, Lubenow,
Bowden, Cuozzo and Mehlert), no two of them agree on how to classify some
of the most well-known fossils. In fact, AIG's favored expert on human evolution, Marvin
Lubenow, assigns OH 13 (one of the fossils AIG says is just a variation of the true
human kind) to the australopithecines! So much for 'easy to assign'. - JF